A typical automatic fabric or clothes dryer includes a drum rotatable about a horizontal axis to receive clothes or other fabrics to be dried. During operation the drum is rotated and heated air passes through the drum from the rear to the front to extract moisture from the fabrics. This air then passes through a filter to remove lint and exhausts from the dryer housing. The filter normally is at the front of the dryer for ease of cleaning and the air normally is exhausted from the rear portion of the dryer as an aid in exhausting the air to the outside of the building. Typically air flow through the dryer is provided by a centrifugal blower. Centrifugal blowers are relatively bulky and the direction of air flow through them changes from parallel to the blower wheel axis to perpendicular to the blower axis. This tends to cause the blower and immediately adjacent conduit to be relatively large.
It is desirable to mount the drum with its open front end fairly close to the front wall of the dryer housing to provide maximum drum size in a given housing size. The relatively large size of the centrifugal blower required for a given air flow results in the blower and its housing normally being positioned behind the panel or other structure supporting the front of the drum. Additional conduit structure is used to guide the air from the front of the drum and filter to the blower.
It is an object of this invention to provide a fabric dryer which effectively utilizes a tangential blower for air flow.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a fabric dryer in which the housing for the air blower and the adjacent air flow conduit are formed by using components normally used in the dryer for other purposes.
It is a further object of this invention to provide an improved fabric dryer which makes better use of space and materials.